The Millennium meant to bring with it a wave of violence from maniacal cultists. Just before Christmas 1999, the Italian intelligence services warned the Pope that St Peter's could be attacked by Satanists, who had grouped together under the banner of the Followers of Beelzebub. They also worried about members of New Acropolis, a mysterious and mystifying sect dedicated to avenging the death of Giordano Bruno, an obscure philosopher who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600.

The Jerusalem police were told to keep an eye open for Monte Kim Miller, who fancied himself a messenger of God. The former marketing manager with Procter & Gamble had predicted that his home town of Denver, Colorado, would be destroyed by an earthquake on 10 October 1997. His followers sold their homes and furniture. They were too hasty. Denver was still standing on 11 October. Eighty-five members of Miller's Concerned Christian cult vanished. The FBI worried that they would regroup in Jerusalem and attack holy sites on the eve of the millennium.

As it was, not much happened in Rome or Jerusalem. The religious maniacs who were to do real damage waited until 11 September 2001, and they weren't interested in anniversaries of Christ's birth.

In 2000, wild-eyed believers in Satan or the Second Coming were less hysterical than outwardly intelligent people. Investors, who believed that markets were rational, poured money into dotcom and telecom shares. They inflated the bubble to a point where a cataclysmic fall was inevitable. Meanwhile, managers and governments, who believed that computer programmers were objective assessors of technological risk, spent somewhere between £150 billion and £500bn warding off the millennium bug.

The precautions weren't enough, science correspondents assured the public. Full-throated doomsters predicted planes falling out of the sky, the infrastructure collapsing, nuclear missiles launching of their own accord and riots spreading as starving looters snatched what food was left on the shelves. Less excitable Mystic Megs said there would be a huge disruption to business and the emergency services, but not an actual apocalypse.

As it was, not much happened. Either the global effort to exterminate the bug was more successful than anyone dared hope or empire-building computer technicians created a pandemic of panic.

The latter seems more likely, and the dotcom bubble and the millennium bug paranoia suggest that historians will look back in wonder at many beliefs otherwise reasonable people held to be self-evident. After gazing at the stock-market and millennium-bug delusions, will they turn to the repulsion of the fin-de-siècle European middle-class for genetically modified food?

It's too early to be certain, but GM food has been around for about a decade in America and there's an embarrassing shortage of diners dropping dead and genetically modified superweeds rampaging across the prairies. Last week, the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, told the Government's review of GM crops that there was no evidence that they created allergic reactions or damaged health or reduced the nutritional quality of food. I would guess that the scientists failed to convince a single discerning eater. Just as the wised-up were certain that computers were going to crash at one minute past midnight on New Year's Day 2001, so they are now certain that GM food is unsafe and inferior.

The conditions which created the bug panic perfectly match the causes of the GM food phobia. Anthony Finkelstein, professor of software systems engineering at University College, London, had fruitlessly warned that billions of pounds were being wasted in the fight against the bug. In January 2000, when the catastrophe had failed to happen, he identified three causes of the mania.

The first was the developed world's state of ignorant dependence. People depended on computers but knew little about them. They were ready to be scared. Everyone depends on food, but most cannot understand how scientists can transplant bacterial DNA into a plant. All we know is that it sounds unnatural. It isn't a great comfort to learn that the human race has been genetically engineering crops by cross-breeding since the invention of agriculture because we don't understand plant breeding, either.

Second, Said Finkelstein, someone must have an interest in promoting fear. The millennium bug made a lot of technicians a lot of money. With GM food, the commercial interest appeared to be with the other side. Monsanto, the biggest supplier of GM crops, began lobbying to get GM food accepted in Europe in 1998. Its timing was terrible. Capitalist triumphalism was at its height and people were wary of US corporations which seemed able to persuade weak governments to let them do whatever they wanted.

But GM also upset the interests of the setters of style and taste. Marie Antoinette and her courtiers dressed up as peasants and shepherds. They invented a phoney authenticity and pretended to live the simple life while the real French peasantry was close to starvation. Their heirs have a fad for 'nat ural' child birth, although genuinely natural child birth for most women in the Third World is about the most dangerous experience of their lives. Discriminating modern Europeans also want the organic food the peasantry once produced, although, again, natural farming for the majority of peasant farmers is back-breaking drudgery, most of which is undertaken by the women who have survived the pains of natural child birth.

Last, but by no means least, come the media. The millennium bug was a fantastic story until 1 January 2000. The clock was ticking. Robots were about to run amok. There was a race against time to save the planet. What hack could ask for more? GM food was the issue which took Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth from the broadsheet press's ghetto to the popular mainstream. There was a time when you couldn't pick up the Daily Mail without seeing a warning about what 'Frankenstein foods' might do to you or your children.

Which isn't to say that the environmentalists have been proved wrong. Whatever the Royal Society says, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Just because no one has proved that GM food can damage your health doesn't mean that it can't. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have a check list of dozens of tests they want carried out. Their spokesmen point out, reasonably, that it is very hard to find out if GM food has damaged Americans because there has been no proper monitoring of who eats what.

The power of the biotech business to push regulators about is as feared now as it was in the 1990s, and with justice. But still, Greenpeace, in particular, will be against GM crops whatever tests are passed and so will millions of European consumers.

If the GM scare boiled down to what Europeans eat, it wouldn't matter greatly. The Government is angry that biotech industries are being driven offshore and jobs and new industries are being lost forever. But the consumer is king and consumers in Britain and the rest of the EU have made their minds up that they don't want GM. They may be being silly, but governments can't legislate against folly.

When it comes to the Third World, however, resistance to GM may be malign. The opponents of biotech emphasise that the industry isn't interested in feeding the hungry any more than the pharmaceutical companies are interested in treating malaria. The developed world is where the profits are.

But there are inventions such as the 'golden rice', created by Dr Ingo Potrykus of Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich, which aim to relieve suffering. Dr Potrykus modified rice to help the 200 million or so children who risk death or blindness from vitamin A deficiency. If it works, and if it is taken up in Asia - two big ifs - children will live who would otherwise die.

Dr Potrykus isn't a pawn of Monsanto, yet he is vilified. He has been told that he has been used by the biotech companies and that people will have to eat impossibly large amounts of his rice to get a minimal benefit. He denies both allegations. When he learned that Greenpeace had reserved the right to take direct action against golden rice tests plots, he said it would be guilty of a 'crime against humanity' if it did.

Historians are likely to write more in anger than amused bewilderment if the GM phobia turns out to have been a European mania which was fatal for non-Europeans.